Statement from Stroud Green Party 9th May 2017

9 May 2017

Greens – Progressive Alliance - ‘We tried to work with other parties for the common good’.

* The Green Party has been seeking co-operation with the Lib Dems and Labour for many months to overcome our unfair voting system and come to reciprocal arrangements in a handful of marginal constituencies to stand up against Tory authoritarianism.

* As no positive response has been received from the Lib Dem and Labour leadership, despite the urging of many of their MPs and party members, the Green Party will be standing candidates in all of Gloucestershire’s constituencies.

* Sarah Lunnon, Green Party Parliamentary Candidate for Stroud said ‘Electoral alliances were never about standing aside. We wanted to stand together with the other parties to campaign for some shared principles. Other parties may have chosen to sit things out, but we won’t – our common future is too important.’

Doing politics differently isn’t just something the Green Party talks about – it’s what we do.

That’s why our Green leaders reached out nationally to the Labour and Liberal Democrat leadership many months ago and invited them to co-operate electorally as a way of overcoming our archaic and undemocratic voting system, and securing electoral reform.

When a snap General Election was called, efforts were redoubled to get them round the table. Leading Green Party members in Gloucestershire started talks with local Lib Dem and Labour parties with the view of making an electoral agreement at a county level.

And following recent County Council elections on May 4, when the Greens were the only party in opposition bucking the trend and increasing our number of county councillors, Greens reached out again.

‘We wanted to make this work – and at the countless public meetings we’ve been to up and down the country, it’s clear that grassroots members of both Labour and Liberal Democrats, and the wider public, wanted it to as well.

But now we know their party leaders won’t let them. The old politics is dead and its Leaders are stuck in the past, refusing to protect the country against Theresa May’s authoritarianism. Confronted with the prospect of a one-party state, they put narrow party interests ahead of the national interest and rejected the prospect of preventing a Conservative landslide.’